Page 270 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

252 Gay Pioneers: How Drummer Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

to history, no model identification documents or signed releases, and no
mail-order business.
Drummer was a brand name, yes, and had momentum, yes, and an
ardent fan following, yes; but Drummer was made by all three publishers
into a suicidal succubus draining cash, time, and talent because it was always
run not as a proper business but as a gay business. It was Mickey and Judy
putting on an unsustainable show in the barn. The first publisher, Embry,
hitched his chapbook Drummer to the H.E.L.P Newsletter to access its sub-
scriber list in order to sell personal ads, sex toys, and poppers mail-order. My
friend from the 1960s, the Chicago psychiatrist Andrew Charles, who had
deep pockets and a loaded checkbook, became the second publisher when
he established Desmodus, Inc., and bought Drummer as a trophy-toy for his
lover Anthony DeBlase, who, moving to San Francisco, and throwing his
jolly weight around at Drummer, became an instant leather celebrity and
corporal instructor of eager young leather bottoms worshiping “everything
Drummer.” The eyewitness evidence of this dynamic is in DeBlase’s four-
feature USSM video series starring himself as the epicene “Fledermaus,” the
San Francisco whipmeister to hot and handsome young men—models from
Mikal Bales’ Zeus Studio in Los Angeles—who would have been out of his
league were he not the publisher of Drummer.
Embry and DeBlase, with paradigms of Hugh Hefner dancing in both
their heads, figured Drummer was a gay Playboy with the Playboy lifestyle.
DeBlase and Charles stuffed their new mansion, south of San Francisco, with
designer furniture, and staffed it with a revolving crew of leatherboy butlers
and servants waiting on visiting LA leather-porn moguls such as Bales, and
BDSM models such as Scott Answer who, like an Edwardian aristocrat
changing into proper attire for morning, afternoon, and evening, slipped
unironically every hour or so into new West Hollywood fashions made of
leather, then rubber, then latex, pushing his didactic LA fetish exhibition
at rival San Franciscans, happy with basic black leather. Embry struggled
vaingloriously to open his “exclusive Drummer Key Club” on Folsom Street
where it flopped. Embry also exploited the start-up of the Mr. Drummer
Contest to turn the contestants into free models for centerfolds like Playboy
Bunnies. In the annals and anals of gay liberation, sexual objectification
has an enthusiastic and valuable tradition, but only as long as the contestant
models are complicit in their pop-culture roles, and thus empower them-
selves through performances which can enhance their self-esteem, perhaps
damaged in their youth by nationalized American homophobia.
However, the Hefner business model was more than about content or
contests. Drummer needed to follow Hefner’s paradigm for Playboy, or Larry

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved—posted 03-16-2017
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